#papyrusnabayat

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Sutekh, god of Naqada ☀️

The ancient city of Naqada (Nubt, Nabayat, choose your vocalization) has always been his home. A place he could go where his most demonized actions would never follow. They know who their protector is and who it always has been.

Commissioned from Kiwibon

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Look at Sokar and Djehuty holding hands in the Amduat

I cannot believe I predicted Djehuty/Sokar

Source: Egyptian Festivals: Enactments of Religious Renewal p 65

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and now a bit of linguistic lore:

Sutekh adjusts to linguistic changes the quickest. He seems to pick up colloquialisms and language shifts almost immediately after they spread among the people of Kemet.

Djehuty, on the other hand, DESPISES LANGUAGE SHIFTS with EVERY FIBER OF HIS BEING. During the Battle of Kadesh story, which takes place firmly in the Late Bronze Age, Djehuty is still speaking Middle Egyptian and sounds like an ass.

Suty, on the other hand? The second the Kemetic language shifted toward analytic, he was all over it. Who needs to conjugate a verb when you have a handy preposition to get the job done?

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Sutekh, the god of storms, deserts, war, chaos, and foreigners

From Papyrus Nabayat

Quotes:

"Am I making you uncomfortable? Good. You ought to be. Nothing ever changes from remaining comfortable."

"History is written by the victors. Why do you assume my own would be any different?"

"I am the one who speaks up while others bow their heads and remain quiet, too afraid to go against the grain."

Commissioned work, lines by ArgenemArtwork

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Ra, god of the afternoon sun

Few deities have attained as a high a position with the mortals as Ra, and his ego matches his worship. Confident, elitist, and with a nasty temper, you can tell that all those violent eye-goddesses are definitely Ra’s daughters. The rage and power of the sun is known to all, and his grip on control of Kemet ever since the 3rd Dynasty can be tyrannical to some, but Ra has been difficult to shake from his position. Well, until Amun came along, anyway.

Ra understands the value of both power and politics. As a result he has a habit of marrying his daughters (of which most of his children are daughters, given he has only two sons) to deities he wants to control or keep subjugated under his thumb. And that worked great up until he married Mut to Montu, to gain some control down in the area of Waset… until Mut decided she’d rather date that hot Nubian god named Amun, and Ra’s problems formally began.

He hates, hates, hates Amun. There is nothing Ra despises more than the fact that Amun gets the honorific position in their Amun-Ra synchronism. Kingship has always belonged to Ra and his carefully decided descendants, and when the Third Intermediate Period came along and the Priests of Amun decided they ought to be running the south instead of the pharaoh in the north, or that set of Nubian pharaohs empowered by Amun, well… suffice to say Ra is on the verge of an all-out war with Amun, a war that no one can afford to engage in with all the changes happening in the world around them. Who’s going to defend Kemet against the Assyrians if Ra and Amun are busy in-fighting?

Some bonus information about him:

In search of power and immortality like the Sumerian gods, who did not have to deal with ba’s and ka’s, Ra was cursed early in his life to reflect his three names - Khepri, Ra, and Atum (though these are technically the nicknames for each phase of his identity and not the names themselves). In simplified form: as the sun changes positions in the sky, he experiences a mortal life and is reborn at sunrise as Khepri, becomes strong and youthful again as Ra at high noon, then ages into an elderly form as Atum in the evening before becoming reborn again.

He was cursed by the snake god Rerek right before the First Intermediate Period, in which Ra started physically changing as he entered each phase. The story is a whole thing on its own that stretches back to Ra’s jealousy over Rerek’s ability to revive his form directly as an ahk-spirit (or divine soul) without having to unite a ba and ka together. Ra could see that Rerek’s divinity was different and was immensely jealous over it. (Bonus lore: Rerek is the snake that stole the herb of immortality from Gilgameš. You pull that kind of shit and you get kicked out of your homeland by Ninazu.)

Ra’s aging isn’t exactly like a mortal’s in its transition. At 6 AM, the sun rises and he is Khepri, who appears about 15 years old. He slowly ages at a rate of 2.5 years/hour until 12 PM, when he looks about 30 and becomes Ra. He ages at a rate of 2.5 years/hour again until he’s 45 at 6 PM, then continues aging at that same rate. At midnight, when he appears about 60, his rejuvenation triggers and he starts aging backwards at a rate of 7.5 years/hour then eventually reaches the age of Khepri at 6 AM and starts aging forward again at the slower rate.

This means that when Ra encounters Apep in the seventh hour of the night (1 AM) his rejuvenation has already triggered and he’s one hour into reversing his aging back into Ra (which takes, in this compressed time period, three hours). So he’s 52.5 years old, roughly, when he fights Apep as Atum. Because he’s not at his strongest (30-45) he struggles with fighting the serpent alone and needs assistance of other gods—though Atum is still very strong, and by no means helpless.

Ra does have three names. Names are powerful and allow a degree of compelling against the being they’re tied to, so deities keep their true names secret. Aset knows Ra’s true name, but she doesn’t know Atum or Khepri’s. This means that from 3 AM - 6 AM and 12 PM - 6 PM, Aset can compel Ra using his true name.

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Djehuty, the god of scribes, knowledge, wisdom, and the moon

A well-known and ancient deity from the Kemet pantheon, Djehuty manages to seamlessly combine being an academic elitist and being a coward gentle soul that really just dreams of someday living in a perfect world where his fellow deities use their brains, you know, for a change. Such is the challenge of being a god of knowledge and wisdom in a world full of divinized natural forces who tend to act on impulse.

Djehuty is constantly faced with the struggle of knowing better than his more powerful (and violent) peers who apparently cannot fathom the usefulness of a knowledge and wisdom deity. As a result, he tends to slip into a judgmental, short-tempered, and rather condescending attitude when irritated, which is frequently (especially given that Sutekh adores him, about as much as he adores annoying the shit out of him). Djehuty just does not handle frustration all that well, unfortunately. Nor does it help that he is a traditionalist who hates change. Djehuty has to be practically forced into acquiescing to any kind of cultural change and has a loooooong adjustment period.

As one of the oldest gods of the Kemet pantheon, he’s seen a lot of shit, some of it genuinely traumatizing, and he’s well aware of the power difference between himself and more… er, physically powerful deities. But he’s managed to stay alive this long, which is more than he can say for other deities that operate in the cerebral realm, so he must be doing something right. Being under Sutekh’s protection helps a lot, though, and makes foreign envoy trips less stressful for him.

Highlights in his life include:

designing, with the artistic assistance of his close friend Ptah, the hieroglyphic and hieratic writing system (Djehuty can’t draw, unfortunately)

avoiding getting killed during all the major regime changes that have rocked the Kemet pantheon’s stability and its lands

cultivating a dramatic rivalry with his counterpart in Mesopotamia, Nabu, who is apparently incapable of not brutally criticizing everything he publishes (while being overly excited to read it too)

orchestrating an embezzling scheme in Ptah’s temple, though he did get caught by Sokar so he had to stop

trying desperately to befriend Nisaba, the Mesopotamian goddess of scribes, despite the fact that she clearly thinks his vibes are unpleasant

setting into motion the biggest conflict the Kemet pantheon has ever experienced - Djehuty was the catalyst behind Usire’s death, though very few gods know he was the culprit and not Sutekh

writing bad romance stories under a pseudonym, which Sutekh distributes to literate deities in foreign pantheons, thus earning himself royalties that preclude ever having to get wrapped up in an embezzling scheme again (probably)

Commissioned work, lines by ArgenemArtwork

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Hathor, goddess of love, sexuality, music, and the sun

Hathor is the middle child in Ra’s brood of sun goddess daughters (and the twin to Sekhmet) and one of the famous wrathful Eye Goddesses, but from the way she behaves, you’d think she was the youngest. Hathor tends to flip between behaving very cutesy and speaking in a high-pitched voice and snarling at and threatening other deities, and because of her powerful nature, those threats are pretty potent. She’s independent, goal-oriented, and ruthless in her pursuit of what she wants. Nobody can get in the way of her desires, no matter who they might be.

She has long disliked the fact that her eldest sister, Tefnut, was the one who gained access to the queenship. Hathor has tried her best to weasel her way into power, but the fact that the royal couples tend to result from married twins has made her efforts difficult. It’s not until Heru is born—alone, without being the twin of a goddess—that Hathor sees her opportunity. When Heru comes of age, Hathor swoops in and easily becomes his royal queen, finally achieving the goal that she had her eye on after hundreds of years of yearning. This causes a lot of drama with Aset, but Hathor doesn’t care what Aset wants or what she approves of. She has Heru wrapped around her finger, and now the Kemet pantheon is in her hands.

But what to do with it? Well, she has some ideas, and they involve capitalizing on her popularity among foreigners. Hathor has long had contacts outside of Kemet stretching into Sinai. Her close relationship with Baalat Gebal in Gubla (Byblos) makes her a powerful trade negotiator and has given Kemet a strong foothold in Retjenu. And as the goddess that oversees the turquoise mines in the Sinai peninsula, she has access to rare and valuable trade materials, allowing her influence to stretch even further north and east. Hathor is a force to be reckoned with, one that Aset grows ever more cautious of as her son slips further and further away into the realm of Hathor’s influence.

Highlights in her life include:

- Getting very, very close to seducing Hor the Older, which was why she felt her right to queenship was snatched out of her hands. When her father and sisters planned to go to war with Hor the Older, Hathor tried a more… alternative way of solving the problem. But when she found out Hor had aspirations for marrying Neith (who had zero interest in that arrangement whatsoever), Hathor lost her temper and switched tactics back to violence.

- She has one son with Heru, Ihy, the god of music and joy. Hathor has struggled to get pregnant again and Heru seems uncomfortable about passing the kingship to a god without some sort of war or sun divine aspect, so Ihy seems out of the running as the next king. (As for the “Sons of Horus,” they are his sons in name only and not related to him or Hathor, but that’s a story for another day.)

- Starting quite the rivalry with her family members. She and Aset do not get along in the slightest, and honestly it’s understandable why. She and Tefnut don’t have a very good relationship either due to her jealousy over Tefnut’s firstborn daughter position. She and Sekhmet developed bad blood when Hathor hit on Sekhmet’s husband Ptah at a family gathering. Her youngest sister Bastet mostly ignores her, and Hathor returns the same.

Commissioned lines from Argenemartwork

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Nebet-hut, goddess of darkness and mourning

If there’s one goddess who feels like she’s drawn the short stick in the bunch, it’s Nebet-hut. While she’s undoubtedly part of a quartet of siblings that play some of the biggest roles in Kemet’s divine sphere, Nebet-hut is often left feeling like an afterthought tacked on to balance Sutekh. If he didn’t exist, would she, when she was the last one born and everyone comes in balanced pairs?

Her relationship with her sister, Aset, has always been complicated. She loves her sister, but can’t help but feel like everyone—from their parents to their worshippers—consider her like an extension of Aset. Aset is more important, more powerful, the queen. What is Nebet-hut but a shadow of her sister? How does a goddess make an identity for herself when she’s always envisioned as a double to Aset? Nebet-hut is forever entangled in trying to figure out what she wants out of her existence, independent of what Aset or their brother Usire needs.

And then there’s Sutekh. Good grief, she did not want to be married to him. Not only is Nebet-hut not attracted to him, but she resents the fact that yet another aspect of her independence and identity has been ripped from her. If she’s not Aset’s Sister, then she’s Sutekh’s Wife. Why can’t she be herself? To make matters worse, Nebet-hut has figured out one thing she wants out of life—she wants to be a mother—and Sutekh is infertile and cannot even give her that. It adds yet another layer of frustration and anger on top of everything else.

Nebet-hut already feels like goddesses play second sistrum to gods. She sees the pain and struggle that Aset goes through, trying to earn respect for her position as queen despite what feels like the world working against her. And Nebet-hut will always support her in that endeavor. But Aset doesn’t seem to comprehend how truly invisible Nebet-hut is to the world when not linked to one of her siblings, and Nebet-hut honestly wishes she would.

Highlights of her life include:

- Nebet-hut has generally tried to play the role she was forced into without complaint, as she was socialized to do so, but when Sutekh couldn’t make her a mother she took matters into her own hands. Nebet-hut, though she feels bad about stepping outside her marriage to try to conceive children, has figured out that no one is going to give her what she wants or needs out of life; only she can do that for herself.

- She has a strong relationship with her mother, Nut, stronger than Aset has, which is one of the few things Nebet-hut has over Aset. And it’s sad that she has to silently compete over something like that to boost her self-esteem, but it is what it is.

- In her efforts to achieve her own independence and shape her life independently of her siblings, she has actually found herself to be quite fond of Sokar. The two have a good affinity with each other. Her relationships with the Duat gods in general is far healthier than her other siblings, and she cares deeply for the deceased mortals that pass through Duat itself. It does seem that if ever there was a time that Kemet considered a Queen of the Underworld like Sumer has, she would be the best option. A Kemetic Ereškigal, anyone? Maybe? Perhaps? It would be nice…

Lines commissioned from Argenemartwork